Seeing What Others Don't: The Remarkable Ways We Gain Insights
by Gary Klein
Takeaways from the book
* Two cops were stuck in traffic, but they didn't feel impatient. They were on a routine patrol, and not much was going on that morning. The older cop was driving. He’s the one who told me the story, proud of his partner. As they waited for the light to change, the younger cop glanced at the fancy new BMW in front of them. The driver took a long drag on his cigarette, took it out of his mouth, and flicked the ashes onto the upholstery.
“Did you see that? He just ashed his car,” the younger cop exclaimed. He couldn't believe it. “That’s a new car and he just ashed his cigarette in that car.” That was his insight. Who would ash his cigarette in a brand new car? Not the owner of the car. Not a friend who borrowed the car. Possibly a guy who had just stolen the car. As the older cop described it, “We lit him up. Wham! We’re in pursuit, stolen car. Beautiful observation. Genius. I wanted to hug him it was so smart.”
I like this kind of story that shows people being clever, noticing things that aren't obvious to others.
*
To improve performance, we need to do two things. The down arrow is what we have to reduce, errors. The up arrow is what we have to increase, insights. Performance improvement depends on doing both of these things.
* Our insights transform us in several ways. They change how we understand, act, see, feel, and desire. They change how we understand. They transform our thinking; our new story gives us a different viewpoint. They change how we act. In some cases insights transform our abilities as well as our understanding;
* Connections
The person making the discovery gets some new piece of information and sees how it combines with other information to form a new idea. Sometimes the person sees a new way to combine different kinds of information even if none of them are new.
The strategy offers a clear image of insights as connecting the dots. And it suggests that we can increase insights by exposing ourselves to lots of different ideas that might help us form new connections.
* Coincidences and Curiosities
Coincidences are chance concurrences that should be ignored except that every so often they provide us with an early warning about a new pattern.
Some insights were sparked by a single event or observation that provoked the reaction “What’s going on here?” These curiosity-driven investigations often led to impressive discoveries.
Curiosities differ from coincidences in one way: They are sparked by a single event or observation rather than by the repetition of a pattern.
* Contradictions
CONTRADICTION INSIGHTS SPARK THE EMOTIONAL REACTION “No way!” We give this almost involuntary expression of disbelief when we encounter ideas that just don’t make sense. Think of this reaction as akin to a “Tilt!” message when an old-time pinball machine got jostled too aggressively. These mental Tilt! reflexes are the opposite of connections and coincidences. Instead of reacting to the way ideas fit together, we react to inconsistencies.
Contradiction insights send us on the road to a better story. They signal that there’s something seriously wrong with the story we’re currently telling ourselves. The example of the young cop who spotted a driver ashing his car goes from zero to sixty, from the Tilt! reflex to the new story, in seconds.
Contradictions are different from curiosity insights. Curiosities make us wonder what’s going on, whereas contradictions make us doubt—“That can’t be right.”
* Creative Desperation
Creative desperation, a fifth insight strategy, is very different from connecting ideas or noticing coincidences or curiosities or contradictions. Creative desperation requires finding a way out of a trap that seems inescapable.
In 1793, Napoleon Bonaparte faced the issue of how to attack a much stronger Anglo-Spanish force occupying the city of Toulon. The fate of the new French Republic depended on repelling the invaders, but the French military commander at Toulon was stymied.
On August 28, 1793, an Anglo-Spanish fleet landed 13,000 troops to defend Toulon. It took control of the great naval arsenal and captured almost half the French Navy. Unless the Republicans could repel that force, they’d have to concede the control of the seas to the British. Worse, royalists in other French areas would be encouraged to join the revolt. Already the royalists in Toulon swore allegiance to a young Louis XVII as the new king of France.
The French Republic desperately needed to drive out the Anglo-Spanish occupiers. The Republican army had besieged Toulon, but without effect because the Anglo-Spanish forces were resupplied by sea. The invaders were too strong, too numerous, and too well defended to be defeated by force.
Napoleon relied on creative desperation to invent a new tactic. This victory in 1793 moved Napoleon from obscurity to fame and power. Napoleon had arrived at Toulon as an artillery captain. He left as a brigadier general. He was only twenty-four years old.
He found a central assumption he could jettison: he didn’t have to overpower the invaders or force them to surrender. He didn’t even have to attack them. He just needed to get them to leave Toulon. And he could do that by disrupting their resupply route. In studying contour maps, Napoleon noticed two small, lightly guarded forts, l’Eguillette and Balaguier, on a hill overlooking the Toulon harbor. The forts had little value for directly attacking the invaders in Toulon, but Napoleon saw how he could use these forts to control movement in and out of the harbor and prevent the invaders from getting supplies.
* The diagram of a Triple Path Model of insight tries to capture these features. It is a Triple Path Model because the remaining strategies, connections, coincidences, and curiosities are combined in the third path, which is shown as the middle column
* We don’t need Columbo to spot inconsistencies. We can do it ourselves,using confusions, contradictions, and conflicts as springboards to insights. Usually we feel frustrated when we run into these kinds of disruptions,but they represent openings for making discoveries. We just have to replace our feelings of consternation with curiosity. We can take advantage of our Tilt! reflex.
* The connection path thrives on having lots of ideas swirling around and on making accidental linkages. The more swirl and turbulence, the greater the chance for a discovery.
If we increase these accidental linkages, we might be able to gain more insights by expanding our exposure to unfamiliar activities. We can try to have more varied experiences ourselves, or we can increase our encounters with different kinds of people, working in a variety of areas, peppering us with new ideas. Each of these ideas could become a new anchor for us, seeding a new combination of concepts.
In his 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson recommends ways to increase creative turbulence. According to Johnson, we should find ways to increase the density of ideas to which we are exposed and to increase our contact with creative people. We should foster serendipity—the random collision of ideas. We should increase our intersections with different communities, using real and virtual gathering places such as coffeehouses and social networks. We should encourage. group and network collaboration as opposed to individual efforts. We should take on multiple hobbies. Each of these recommendations would strengthen our chances of making unexpected connections.
* Probably the most effective strategy is to engage in something called “critical thinking,” a systematic analysis of evidence, a process of thinking that questions assumptions, not by asking people to exhaustively list all their assumptions, but by logically reviewing the evidence in order to decide whether or not to believe specific claims.
* THE PAUSE THAT REFRESHES. Wallas enshrined incubation in his four-stage model, and many other scientists have endorsed the importance of incubation in their work.
One idea, dating all the way back to Wallas, is that during incubation our unconscious mind continues to chew on the problem. A second idea is that incubation may work by letting us recover from mental fatigue. Prolonged concentration may drain our mental energy, and so a period of relaxation may be needed to get us going again. A third explanation is that in a relaxed state we can summon forth remote associations that might otherwise be blocked by our critical analyses.
* I also have some ideas about improving the chances of gaining insights. If we want to increase our own insights, we should know about the different paths: the contradiction path, the connection path, and the creative desperation path. Each path calls for its own methods. The contradiction path depends on our being open to surprises and willing to take them seriously even if they violate our beliefs about the ways things work. The connection path begins when we are open to experiences and ready to speculate about unfamiliar possibilities. The creative desperation path requires us to critically examine our assumptions to detect any that are tripping us up.
